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Saturday, May 30, 2015

What
might I possibly offer to the long and distinguished commentary and praise of
Blues artist B. B. King, who died on May 14, at the age of 89? I saw him only
once in concert, early in Howard and my relationship, probably in 1971 or 1972,
when I had just begun graduate school at the University of Maryland. He
performed in the Terps’ huge basketball stadium, where Howard had also seen him
play years earlier as an undergraduate at the university.

I didn’t
truly understand Blues music back then; I was a lover of classical musical,
Broadway musicals, and some jazz. I was just beginning to learn about opera,
and developing—years after most of my generation—an appreciation for the
popular music with which I’d grown up but had attempted, quite successfully, to
block out of my consciousness. Sure, I knew the Beatles, but I didn’t truly
appreciate them. I knew and loved folk music, I loved nearly all the choral
compositions I’d sung in university and church choruses. I loved most symphonic
music. I’d loved Nina Simone, Bessie Smith, Lena Horne, the young Ethel Waters.
But I was narrow-minded, still a square. Fats Waller, he was okay. Scott Joplin
was a spirited delight. Pearl Bailey was wonderful. Frank Sinatra, however, did
not impress me. Bing Crosby was ridiculously passe. I knew music but I didn’t understand it the way a true
connoisseur might. What was this
grunting, groaning music that I experienced on that long ago night?

When I
look back to that evening’s performance, I always think of Eudora Welty’s
beautiful story, “Powerhouse,” a story of a late-night Black singer in a Southern
White bar, where he and his band (she based the story on a concert by Fats
Waller) entertained the folk, but found little solace in their breaks and after-performance
evenings, when they were forced to go elsewhere to drink and eat. The wide-open
howl of Waller she describes is not exactly B. B. King’s style, but the
sorrowful songs he sung certainly shared some of the same sensibility.

No, the
series of hissing sibilants I just mouthed do no justice to the primal lyrics
of “The Thrill Is Gone” where trumpets and trombones blare out a brief fanfare
before King’s instrument throbs out a tremolo for about 40 seconds before the
singer rasps in a somewhat declarative voice his pain and disappointment, hinting,
nonetheless, of a deep resignation of the truth:

The thrill is gone

The thrill is gone away

The thrill is gone,
baby

The thrill is gone
away

You know you done me
wrong, baby

And you’ll be sorry
some day

The large lush strings of his back-up band—more in the
style of Count Bassie’s big band than in the manner of his Blues peers such as
Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf—reiterate the plaintive fretting of his guitar.

The thrill is gone

It’s gone away from
me

All the thrill is
gone, baby

The thrill is gone away from me

Although, I’ll still live on

But so lonely I’ll be

We can see the big man’s hurting, he’s sweating,
wiping his face with a rag as if he were washing away his tears. But if he’s
suffering, he won’t allow it to take him over
personally except through the shaking fretwork of the guitar strings.

Nearly
every day, so it appears, the singer wakes up sad. In “Woke Up This Morning,” not
only is the thrill gone, but so is his “baby”:

I woke up this
morning, my baby was gone

Woke up this morning,
my baby was gone

I’ve been so bad, I’m
all alone

I ain’t got nobody stayin’ home with me

I ain’t got nobody stayin’
home with me

My baby’s she’s gone,
I’m in misery

In “Stormy
Monday” he is just as blue:

They called it stormy
Monday, but Tuesday is just as bad

Oh, they called it, the
called it stormy Monday, but

Tuesday is just as bad

Oh, Wednesday is the worst and
Thursday oh so sad

“The eagle flies on Friday”—and suddenly, as if freed
by that flight, the mournful growler gets sassy, almost sashaying through
Saturday as he goes “out to play.” Just as quickly, and inevitably, he seems to
become stopped in his tracks as Sunday comes round, when he falls “on [his]
knees” to pray.

In truth,
we now know, performing nearly every night of year on the road, this great Blues
Boy was the one who, seldom home, had “gone away,” and if his wives walked out
on him it was surely with good reason. No, King’s true love was his guitar
Lucille—everyone knows his many guitars all bore the name of a woman over whom
men were fighting one night before a fire begin, forcing the singer to flee
before returning to reclaim the high-strung love of his life, —and us, the
audience to whom he sang of his ordeals.. And as sad and bad as he may have
been in real life, he was never these things to us, who were just thrilled by
the generous growl of his suffering voice.

That
night with B. B. King, for the first time in my life I think, I felt I knew
what it was like to “be blue.”